Contemporary album of the month – Brad Mehldau: After Bach

The pianist intersperses classic Bach pieces with his own responses in a headscratching album of harmonic adventuresAlso reviewed: Niklas Paschburg | OceanicNo composer looms over modern jazz quite like Johann Sebastian Bach, whose harmonic rigour seems to have provided the basis for bebop and all that followed. Listen to the endlessly mutating semiquavers tumbling from Charlie Parker’s saxophone and it could be the top line of a Bach fantasia; the jolting cycle of chords in John Coltrane...

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